Friday 15 August 2003 19.37 EDT
First published on Friday 15 August 2003 19.37 EDT

Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of the First President of the Royal Academyby Ian McIntyre 624pp, Allen Lane, £30

Joshua Reynolds didn't just bestride his age; he filled it. He was born in 1723, the year that Kneller died (Kneller, who with two other "foreign painters", Holbein and Van Dyck, had dominated English portraiture into the 18th century). He became partially blind and stopped painting the day before the storming of the Bastille - when the world he knew was turned on its head. In between, he did as much as his friends Johnson, Boswell, Garrick and Goldsmith to promote a crucial period of national self-definition. As one of the driving forces behind the foundation of the Royal Academy, and its first president, he helped to create the taste by which his century is judged.

His reputation suffered in the aftermath. Blake, in particular, attacked Reynolds in private and public for being too stuffy, too Establishment, too rigidly rational - the enemy, in fact, of all things Romantic. And because the Romantic ethos has translated so easily into our own, we're tempted to take Blake's word for it. Reynolds belongs in the world of wigs and coffee-houses, his subjects are generally aristocratic if not actually royal, his touchstones are not our own. No life of him has been published since 1958.

Ian McIntyre fills the gap with energy and enthusiasm; he loves his subject, relishes the context, and writes with a passionate thoroughness. Reynolds's ghost owes him a deep bow of gratitude, and everyone interested in the history of western painting will value this book. At the same time, its rewards can feel hard-won. For one thing, Reynolds's own voice is hard to catch - Boswell gives only snatches of his talk, and letter-writing is not his strong suit. ("If I felt the same reluctance in taking a Pencil in my hand as I do a pen", he said, "I should be as bad a Painter as I am a correspondent.") For another, there is such an enormous amount of work to assess - so many hundreds of paintings, let alone the discourses he gave as president of the RA - that the narrative of his life is always prey to avalanches of detail. McIntyre shoulders the workload willingly, but the solidity of his book is more impressive than its sense of forward momentum.

Reynolds worked hard because he realised England had a lot of catching up to do if its painters were to be discussed in the same breath as their European counterparts. But his self-driving also suggests a feeling of precariousness - of fearing that he might fall into obscurity if he ever said no to a commission. McIntyre implies as much by the attention he gives to Reynolds's childhood in Devon (where his father was a schoolmaster), to his apprenticeship in Thomas Hudson's painting "manufactory" in London, and to his early interest in Jonathan Richardson's Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). By the middle of the century, when Reynolds had reached the threshold of his career, the combined influences of home and training had focused him on his work to an exceptional degree, and set in stone the values of diligence, repetition and "the best masters" of the tradition. (By studying these masters, said Richardson, an artist would "gain the ascendant, and have nobler ideas, more love to his country, more moral virtue, more faith, more piety and devotion . . . he shall be a more ingenious and a better man".)

Does this make Reynolds sound dull? Probably - by the standard of the Romantics. When he returned to London from an Italian buying-copying-studying trip in 1752, he got down to business with a devotion that seems frankly workaholic. He drank a bit (and excessively, later, according to some), he was a gracious companion and a good friend, but he wasn't very interested in sex and never married. If this is dull, then dull is what he was - but the description hardly seems to fit when we look at the portraits he produced during this same decade. The picture of his friend Augustus Keppel, for instance, which was "the first thing that distinguished him after his return to his native country", shows Keppel in a gorgeous silver-blue suit, posed dramatically against a stormy sea. Its fusion of grandeur with intimacy, its assertion of human values within a formal structure, is the hallmark of a mind that is at once dignified and intensely charged.

Reynolds struck the same balance in all his best work over the next 40-odd years: the spectacu larly flamboyant The Archers , the monumental Marlborough Family , the more intimate pictures of his friends Baretti and Johnson - the list is a very long one.

So did Blake overstate the case against him? No, in the sense that Blake's own vision of the imagination, his politics, and his sense of the self (not to mention his own self) could never have fitted comfortably into Reynolds's world. Yes, in the sense that Reynolds was neither a stuffed shirt nor a dry stick. And if the formal but lavish portraits that poured out of his studio weren't enough to make the case, then there's the Academy and the discourses - both of which have been criticised for being "old-fashioned" but both of which were in fact pioneering.

Simply getting the Academy up and running at all was a kind of miracle. The idea of such an institution had been around for many years before it was eventually founded in 1768, but had repeatedly been mired in royal indifference and the jealousies of interested parties. The Society of Artists, the Dilettanti Society and the Incorporated Society all wanted to have their say - but it was Reynolds who led the final charge.

Even though he was widely reckoned to be a good bet for the first president, the fact that he disappeared from public view during the final deliberations suggests he well understood the difficulties, as well as the benefits, that the post would bring. We gather a good deal about his social as well as his professional skills when we remember that the organisations competing with the Academy soon left it to get on with its job, and read that by the end of its first year it had attracted 77 students, among whom were Cosway, Wheatley, Farington and Flaxman.

Reynolds began giving his annual discourses soon after the Academy opened its doors - at first very mumblingly, and with advice from Johnson about style, but gradually with more confidence. (The rumour that Johnson wrote the speeches was a malicious exaggeration.) Their reputation - derived, once again, from the Romantics - warns us to expect a narrow range of examples and a torturing rigidity. In fact, they admire the past - and especially Michelangelo - without slumping into ancestor-worship; they are pragmatic without being narrow-minded; and they enjoy formality without discounting flexibility. Read in sequence, they do not promote reason at the expense of feeling, but argue for a proper balance of the two. "Reason," he says in the 13th discourse, "without doubt, must ultimately determine every thing; at this minute it is required to inform us when that very reason is to give way to feeling."

McIntyre is well aware of the enormous shifts in sensibility that divide us from Reynolds. But as his treatment of the discourses shows, he also explores the ways in which Reynolds anticipates qualities we recognise as modern. In the process, he captures many of the characteristics that made Reynolds well liked. In one of his wonderful early self-portraits, Reynolds shows himself shading his eyes, as if dazzled by the glare of the future. In a later one, he holds up one hand to his ear, to indicate his deafness. Both pictures stress what is human and fallible, just as his portraits of the great and the good (and the less great, and the not very good at all) emphasise elements that are common to us all. In this sense, the book is a rehabilitation as well as an investigation; it celebrates continuities while enjoying differences.

Andrew Motion's latest collection of poetry is Public Property (Faber).